Nick Barlow's blog

I was pretty surprised when they announced that the start of this year’s Tour de France would be in Yorkshire. That it would come back to Britain was no surprise but the Yorkshire bid had seemed to come up quite late in the day and seemed doomed to lose out to Scotland. Edinburgh seemed a much better backdrop for a Grand Depart than Leeds, after all.

That, though, was to assume this would follow the format of previous Grand Departs outside France. The formula is pretty simple – a prologue time trial around the host city that shows off all its best sights, then one or two generally flat stages to take the race back to France. The Tour has started using road stages rather than time trials for the opening stage in recent years, but only when it started in France.

What Yorkshire showed is that you can use the Tour to promote a whole region through the Grand Depart, and that the race organisers are willing to throw in tricky stages as part of it. Stage 2 shook up the race much more than a prologue time trial would have done. Dozens of riders could have ended up in yellow after Sheffield, rather than the Martin or Cancellara battle in a time trial.

Having millions of people lining the route, and making the start of the Tour a massive event across another country means we’re now going to see more Grand Departs following the Yorkshire formula. The format for the next Grand Depart in Utrecht was already agreed as the traditional prologue and flat stages formula, but the next time it goes outside of France (likely to be in 2017 or 2018) I think we’ll see somewhere that wants to set up a much more interesting start. Barcelona’s been mentioned as a possible destination, but what we could see is stages that get to roam across the whole of Catalonia.

It also means the Tour’s next Grand Depart in Britain is a question of when and where, not if. I’d expect it either in 2020 or 2021, but there’ll be lots of places now thinking they could follow Yorkshire’s example. Imagine a start in Edinburgh that rolls out through the hills of the Borders followed by a stage in the Lake District? Or going to Wales for a thrash through Snowdonia or the Brecon Beacons? The Tour of Britain has brought out big crowds on Dartmoor for its stages there, and that could be the centrepiece for a bid from the South West.

Finally, what we also saw on Sunday was that the Pennines offer a great platform for a race. There’s surely the scope to build on the success of the Grand Depart and organise a regular one-day classic that could follow a similar route and create some great racing in the style of Liege-Bastogne-Liege? (You could even make sure the route takes in Lancashire and Yorkshire and call it the Tour of the Roses) Britain still doesn’t have a World Tour race, and as the Tour of Britain’s unlikely to make that step up, this could be a real legacy from the Tour de Yorkshire.

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-It’s been announced this morning that the 2014 Tour de France will be starting in Yorkshire. Yorkshire had been bidding for a while to bring the race back to Britain, but the expectation had always been that it’d be sometime later in the decade, so this is a welcome surprise.

The 101st Tour will start in Leeds – presumably with a prologue time trial around the city – followed by another stage in Yorkshire, and then a third stage starting somewhere in the south of England and finishing in London. More details will come in January, but I’m sure people are already poring over their maps of Yorkshire to put together dream routes. A lot of the highest roads in England are in the North Pennines around Yorkshire, so it could be possible to put together a decently hilly stage, even if none of them would rank above a category 3 for the Tour.

I’m also curious to find out where the other stage will be – if it’s starting further south and heading into London, there’s a chance it could start or pass through somewhere in the East (Cambridge, maybe?) which would make a nice stopping-off point on the way home after a weekend in Yorkshire.

This will be the Tour’s fourth visit to Britain – in 1974, they had a stage racing up and down the Plymouth bypass, in 1994, the opening of the Channel Tunnel was marked by two stages taking them from Dover to Portsmouth, and in 2007, the Grand Depart was in London. The gap between British stages is getting smaller, and a natural progression (and the economics of going to what’s probably Europe’s fastest growing cycling market) suggests the Tour could return again this decade – and there has also been interest from Edinburgh in hosting a Grand Depart.

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